One of Steam's biggest games is a secret Chinese porn machine

A program called Wallpaper Engine is one of the biggest apps on Steam, and while it's intended as a way to decorate your computer desktop, a new report suggests that much of its popularity stems from users in China attempting to get around the country's anti-porn laws.

As the MIT Technology Review notes, over 200,000 of Wallpaper Engine's nearly 500,000 Steam user reviews are in Chinese, and the majority of these reviews discuss the application's utility as a porn delivery mechanism. Wallpaper Engine's player counts regularly take it to Steam's top ten, and there are plenty of users making use of it for its intended purpose, but a wild set of real-world circumstances have brought about this extra purpose.

Some background: Wallpaper Engine is a $3.99 / £2.99 / €3.99 program intended to let you robustly customize your desktop wallpaper, adding animations and effects beyond the static images that Windows lets you put down. Users can upload their custom wallpapers for others to download through the Steam Workshop.

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You can also use Wallpaper Engine to make a video into your wallpaper, and even those videos can be uploaded to the Workshop. And, sure enough, those videos include porn. One quick click of a 'subscribe' button and Wallpaper Engine can deliver an .MP4 file containing any number of sex acts straight to your Steam install folder through Valve's own Workshop.

Since you're reading this in English, you probably have easier ways to access whatever sort of sexual content you might be interested in. But it's illegal to share porn in China - MIT Technology Review's report notes that people in China have landed half-a-year of jail time for simply reposting porn on Twitter - and adult content is strictly moderated on social media services there.

Yet Steam "has become one of the only platforms in China where it’s sort of operating in the gray area," Asian games market Daniel Ahmad says in the report. Users in China can access Steam with minimal workarounds, which means that Wallpaper Engine serves as a convenient way to access porn.

While the Steam Workshop typically restricts adult content - you won't find nude mods for Skyrim there, for example - there are apparently no such restrictions for Wallpaper Engine. No explicit content is directly visible outside of the app, but you don't have to spend long browsing the Workshop before stumbling across some strategically cropped images of sexual content, much of which bears labels written in Chinese.

Wallpaper Engine's developers don't have much issue with the app being used this way. MIT Technology Review translates a 2019 quote which appeared in Chinese media from developer Kristjan Skutta: "What’s wrong with that? Wallpaper Engine is only a framework. No matter what you upload to it - even those crazy videos - I don’t think there’s any problem."

While most of them don't feature any pornography, the best Steam games still offer plenty to enjoy.